Robert Fulford's 1998 column about
Seinfeld

The words of philosophers sometimes explain the way we live now,
and Clifford Orwin of the University of Toronto did that for me
last year when he wrote about "the discourse of compassion." He
was describing the way we frame public events in the 1990s. To an
extent that no one could have predicted, compassion has become the
governing rhetorical style of our times, and the standard by which
everyone is judged. If we can show compassion, then we are good
people. If we cannot, we are not. This may have nothing to do
with what we accomplish. Displayed feeling, not action, is what
counts. Compassion, in our time, is essentially a performance art.

Seen against this background, we can consider Seinfeld an event in
emotional history as well as a television show. From the
beginning, Seinfeld has placed itself outside the discourse of
compassion, ignoring the main current of contemporary feeling. On
Seinfeld, people do not hug or dissolve in tears. (Tomorrow
night's final episode may break those rules, but it seems
unlikely.)

Politically, Seinfeld ranges from standard-liberal to
don't-bother-me conservative. But emotionally, it's radical. It
differs fundamentally from all earlier TV comedy. By contrast,
Mary Tyler Moore and MASH drowned in tears. Seinfeld has many
qualities--on good nights the script is as well crafted as anything
ever written for television, and the performers demonstrate
wonderful style and energy. It's high-level farce. But what makes
it unique is emotional distance.

Clifford Orwin called his essay on compassion (in The Public
Interest, a Washington quarterly) "Moist eyes--from Rousseau to
Clinton." He traced the 1990s mood back to the 18th century and
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who "founded not only the cult of compassion
but also that of sincerity." Rousseau taught that we may act badly
so long as our feelings are sincere and so long as we show goodness
of heart. As Orwin sees it, "Rousseau invented liberal guilt." A
guilty liberal is someone who does nothing for the poor except
moistly sympathize. A guilty liberal knows that at some level it
feels good to feel bad about social problems.

Long before the Lewinsky scandal, Orwin explained how it works for
Bill Clinton: "Other parts of Clinton's anatomy may wander, but the
public appears convinced that his heart remains in the right
place." Clinton is good because he shows his feelings.
Vice-president Al Gore made a strenuous claim for similar virtue by
discussing in public his son's near-death and his sister's death
from cancer.

Public compassion reached new intensity last summer in the orgy of
mourning that followed the death of the Princess of Wales. In this
case compassion became so hysterical that it approached
totalitarianism: those failing to show sufficient sadness were
condemned as inhuman. The queen became compassion's victim, forced
to express acceptable feelings or lose status with the public. As
the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips wrote at the time, "The
coercive demand that people should perform their feelings has
become extortionate....Emotions are considered to be real only when
one is seen having them."

While Clinton remains the world's compassion champion, Prime
Minister Tony Blair has demonstrated great talent and may in the
end outperform the master. Last summer Blair jumped so nimbly on
the Lady Di bandwagon that (according to a correspondent in the New
Yorker) his speed frightened even some of his friends. More
recently, when accused of improperly accepting campaign funds, he
declared himself "hurt and upset" by the criticism. With that
quick, deft tug at public emotions, he not only requalified himself
as vulnerable and caring but also created a new context for
discussing his future mistakes. He was saying that, just as he
shows compassion for others, they too must take his feelings into
account and not wound him.

In Canada, as Richard Gwyn noted in a Toronto Star column
last week, we have adopted "false feeling, feelings without
commitment, feelings displayed for show"--to quote a British study
called Faking It: The Sentimentalization of Modern
Society. This lesson has been learned by Preston Manning. In
the debate over compensating hepatitis victims, Manning and the
Reform Party, violating their own history, have learned how to
out-compassion the Liberals. They have been rewarded for their
shamelessness by the acknowledgement that this makes them an
effective Opposition.

Compassion is totally alien to the Seinfeldian world. No matter
what happens, Seinfeld characters remain unmoved. Events do not
matter to them on any level except the surface: there are no
ecstatic highs, no tragic lows. Jerry and his friends suffer from
what a psychiatrist might call "affective deadening," the inability
to respond in the way that ordinary people find appropriate. The
characters don't reject emotion: they simply fail to notice the
possibility of it. Instead of emotion, they have annoyance. Of
course there are no children, those notorious carriers of emotion,
and love never becomes important enough to produce painful
feelings. There are no moist eyes.

Is such a condition enviable? Of course not. If taken seriously,
it's a world of impotence that never reaches above the infantile.
But in the context of these times, it's refreshing. Seinfeld may
be remembered best as a weekly moment of relief from the
stultifying air of a self-admiring society drunk on a belief in its
own compassion.